Fading Memories

I'm forced to lay off the hacking until December 14, when my new laptop will hopefully arrive. Which means I've got some time to pick up other things that don't need a fast computer. Like continuing an old project of mine: learning to read the bible in Greek. My parents gave me a nice copy of Rahlfs edition of the Septuaginta for my birthday in 1993, and I've been working up the courage to get started on it ever since. (My attempts at Hebrew have been even more laughable, at least I can read modern Greek a little.)

Fortunately, there is a very nice KDE application that's a lot of help, namely Bibletime. Bibletime can use various resources, such as bible texts, lexicons and commentaries and uses the sword library to load them. There is plenty of material -- translations in all kind of languages.

And there is also a free electronic edition of the Septuaginta. (LXX, so called because the tradition will have it that seventy-two Alexandrinian Jewish scholars translated all of the Law in seventy-two days -- the text is the oldest text of the Law we have, even older than the Hebrew texts that have come down to us, and is used as the authoritative text in the Orthodox Church).

There's also a word list, the so-called Strong's Numbers that is a reasonable fit for this text. Only recently, even after I got my Rahlfs edition, a real lexicon to the Septuagint has been published -- and then another one got published, for good measure. The riches! The Septuagint is a difficult book full of obscure koine Greek, neologisms and hebraisms so a good lexicon is important here. Pity I blew my book budget already...

Strong's glosses really aren't quite good enough: for instance, I wish that in "εν αρχη εποιησεν ο θεος τον ουρανον και την γην", "γην" wasn't glossed as "a primary particle of emphasis or qualification (often used with other particles prefixed):--and besides, doubtless, at least, yet." I am fairly sure that "γην" means "earth", here... But that's not bibletime's fault. And the Strong's numbers are still useful, especially when having a KJV or Statenvertaling parallel to the LXX.

But all the pieces are basically complete: text, translation, glosses. If the app doesn't suck, I can get started.

Bibletime's usage of Strong's numbers has improved a lot, too. Previously, the numbers were shown inline in the text itself, breaking up the flow. Clicking on a number would show the gloss. Now there's a nice little box that shows the gloss if your mouse cursor is over a Greek word. Bibletime is very usable, very polished, very helpful and very stable. One of the better KDE applications that are developed outside KDE svn.

My Dell Inspiron 5150 is broken again... This time, the blasted thing won't even start up nine times out of ten attempts, and the tenth time it shuts down after very short while -- I'd be able to login, but nothing more. The eleventh time, I thought I was lucky: it didn't shutdown until KMail had downloaded all my mail from my mailserver. Then it halted again, the only sign of life was the whirring of the fan, but even the little blinkenlights were off.

Which means that I cannot hack on Krita for the time being; that I cannot answer any mail I've been sent this weekend and haven't answered yet; that I will have to try and do my work on this six-year old Powerbook that's curiously enough still working; and that I will have to try to convince Dell that a laptop that's broken down six times in two years is bad product that they under Dutch consumer law need to replace or repair for a very nominal sum if not completely free.

Like many a hacker before me, I'm reading Alan Cooper's The Inmates are Running the Asylum>, and like many hackers before me I feel slightly indignant at his blanket dismissal of my attempts at dishing up an acceptable interface, and like many hackers before me I feel inspired.

Take this idea for instance: drag & drop. Nothing is more natural than that, right? You got a document, drag it onto the app icon, and the app opens the document. But this metaphor is actually the wrong way around. And app is a tool and you take a tool to an object, not an object to a tool. Unless the tool is extraordinarily big and clumsy. I mean -- I take my handsaw to my shelves, my screwdriver to my computer case, but I would take the putative leg of the imaginary chair I'm not building because it's too complicated to the workbench where I could turn it if I knew how to do that.

So, if I've got a couple of tools in my virtual toolbox, like gwenview to view an image or Krita to muck up an image, I think I'd find it more natural to drag & drop the gwenview or Krita icon onto the image icon, instead of the other way around. Take the tool to the object, not the object to the tool.

(Of course, Alan Cooper's book is flawed in many ways. The way he blithely assumes that software is worse than other everyday things is ludicrous to someone who discovers grave design flaws in his new socks (the seams near the toe-end are too big and in the wrong place, making them impossible to wear), swiss pocket knifes (I did feel as much a fool when the blade snapped onto my fingers as when I was told the difference between save as an export in KOffice by David, perhaps even more so) and gas ranges. And there's a reason I'm not car-literate. Everything we use has flaws. Although clothing seems worse than ever. Damn that summer jacket that doesn't breathe and where the zipper always gets stuck.)

The Developer Journals CRM Simon Edwards typed his blog about keyboard configuration in somehow never lets me complete the login procedure, even though I do have an account, so I'll post my reaction here, on my own blog. (Where the comment software does have its own problems, but at least I can post.)

My take on this is: he's right on all counts. Actually, I noticed a recent regression, don't know exactly when it happened first. I used to have two keyboard layouts, one US English (for coding) and one US International with dead keys, for writing Dutch. There aren't actually many computers sold in the Netherlands with the Dutch keyboard layout, most of them have the US layout.

With the version the keyboard configuration in Kubuntu breezy, I can no longer do that: there's just one US keyboard layout that I can select exactly once, and then select a variant to that. So, I can no longer have US without dead keys and US with dead keys in the keyboard layout changer, and I have know whether I want the intl or the alt-intl variant... I have to make do with something closish, like UK with dead keys and US without. Argh.

Of course, I could hack this through editing the command-line for uk into using us... But that's not why I use a configuration dialog.

Oh, and I think I once typed a euro sign by using right-alt-5, but I'm not sure, and at the moment it doesn't seem to work.

Scripting

Cyrille Berger has been working on re-using Kexi's Kross scripting engine with Krita. Kross can potentially use a variety of language interpreters -- from Java to Python, from Ecmascript to Ruby -- to give scripts access to the objects in an application. Together with the regular bindings to Qt and KDE, you get a rich environment that makes it easy to extend and automate an application. Of course, all the Krita plugin does for now is show the traditional "Hello World" message, but Cyrille hopes to get experimental, but useful scripting done before the 1.5 release in February.

PNG Export

Cyrille has also been working on a separate PNG import/export filter. Currently, most common image file formats are handled by the Magick filter. This filter uses ImageMagick's coders and decoders to read and write png, tiff, jpeg -- almost everything but openEXR and Raw. But the Magick filter is written against the primitive C API, instead of the C++ or MagickWand interface to ImageMagick. This API changes often and besides, it's far from clear how to set export parameters like JPEG compression quality. While we will probably keep the Magick filter around for the wide variety of formats it supports (and especially tiff is supported very well), it's really better to have our own filters based directly on libpng, libjpeg and so on.

Active Layer Visualization

A French artist who is strongly influenced by the aesthetics of the better bande dessinee and who goes under the alias of Mr. Youp came to the mailing list with a suggestion on making it easier for the artist to be aware of the active layer. It happens quite often, especially in images with many layers that you start messing with the wrong layer. After much back-and-forth, Mr. Youp posted a link to a mock-up (in Photoshop!) of what he meant. Casper did a quick hack to give it a try, and I must say, it works very well. Mr. Youp is a very fine artist, by the way -- his website is full of amazing drawings. I wish he'd publish a bande dessinee of his own. It would fit in right next to my collection of Gibrat.

Color adjustments

Not a really new feature, but now it's implemented the way it should. Instead of converting every pixel to 8-bit RGB, we now use LCMS to adjust the individual channels. This means we can now adjust the individual channels of, say, a 16-bit/channel CMYK image without doing any conversions. Also not my new preview widget: it has its shortcomings, but it's fast and the display doesn't get messed up. Based on a widget from Amarok.

Finally

Bart Coppens has fixed the duplicate tool and given it a useful tip (we still need to fix the layout of the tool option panes, though. I'm working on a Raw importer, but I'm hampered by a bug in the mimetypes database KDE ships: some raw files are recognized as tiffs. Of course, some raw files, like Adobe's DNG format are tiffs, making the situation even more complex. And I'm finally working again on a painterly feature: a hairy brush that smears paint on the canvas. Not sure whether I'll be able to get that to work, though. A lot of maths is needed.

Reading one book leads to another; and in this case, reading the pseudo-Dorothy Sayers Thrones, Dominations led me to read John Donne. It seems from the quotes in "Thrones, Dominations" that neither Dorothy Sayers nor Jill Patton-Walsh have made much progress in the collected work, all quotes are from poems early in the volume.

Anyway, from Collected Works of John Donne, a natural progression was to the old Penguin Classic, The Metaphysical Poets. This book must have been on Irina's shelves since before I first met her, because it contained a newspaper clipping from December 1986, when I was 17 or 19 years old.

We are still reading the same newspaper: Trouw, one of the surviving underground resistance papers from the second world war, a newspaper with a very Christian identity. Or so it is still regarded...

Reading this clipping shows clearly that there's been quite a bit of change. This clipping contains a review of a translation of Donne's poems and is written by Eduard Pijlman. It is not exquisitely well-written, but the prose is serviceable enough. It suppose, however, a form of Christian belief that Trouw nowadays actively opposes.

By coincidence (coincidence? the "pensees" by Pascal-wannabe Alexander Elchaninov state that whoever believes coincidence exists, doesn't believe in God...), Trouw today published an interview with a minister. This interview was mainly remarkable for its tenacity in trying to get this minister to tell Trouw he didn't believe in God anymore. This minister, Sam Jansen from Driebergen very courageously resisted the onslaught.

The difference between today's interview, and this 19 year-old book review couldn't have been greater. In fact, I suspect the review would be refused by the Nederlands Dagblad.... The reviewer is especially impressed by both Donne's and Donne's translator's insight in St. Paul's second letter to the Philippians.

Not a topic that would make many hearts beat faster -- but a week or two earlier, I received a copy of the latest issue of "Liter". LLoyd Haft, who once taught me modern Chinese, sent me this copy because it contains a number of his poems. One of them, the first in fact, on St. Paul's letter to the Romans.

I'm not really word-perfect, anything but word-perfect in fact, in the tail chapters of the Bible, having grown up in a family of convinced Church-leavers, so I needed to read the letter to the Romans before I knew what I had felt on reading the poem; namely that this was a perfect commentary, an enriching summary (if such a thing can be allowed to exist). Irina tells me the poem about the Acts of the Apostles is even better, and the one on Corinthians I sends shivers down my spine.

I've been studying letters and poems together and have forgotten to write a thank-you note for the copy of Liter... Which we'll subscribe to, since the other content is very interesting, too.

But I wish Trouw would still publish reviews like the one by Eduard Pijlman.

By the way, about the lying winter... Methinks I lied all winter, when I swore my love was infinite, if spring make it more. And about the letter to the Romans (in the hope that quoting one poem is fair use and all that):

Wij vragen nog
naar weten,
wetten,
strekkingen die strikken,
vastmaken,
uitmaken.

Maar waarheid is geen wet:
zij is een wij.
Altijd wijder,
nergens hier alleen.

Waarheid maken wij niet vast.
Wij komen er benaderend,
samen
in beademend beamen.

(Lloyd Haft)

Somehow, this is very close to Christos Yannaras' Freedom of Morality and Zizioulas' Being as Communion. Both are relatively modern (time moves slowly in amateur theology) Greek theologians who emphasize the fact that belief is communion and community. We get there together, as Lloyd Haft says, in untranslateable Dutch.

Read this.

Adrian Page in one fell swoop -- but it must have been a lot of work -- make Krita use OpenGL for rendering. Krita still works without OpenGL, but OpenGL opens the door to really cool and fast filters, really interesting tools and great performance. Moving layers is now smooth and precise. All the interesting paint applications on Windows use OpenGL -- Art Rage and Deep Paint, for instance -- but I don't know of any paint or image editing application on Linux that offers this. It also means that Krita images now can have transparent areas when embedded in other KOffice applications. It used to be that if you had an image with transparent areas, you'd see the gray blocks, instead of the background of the embedding documents.

And, deviating for a moment into Krita internals that are not important for users, but that make the developer's life much easier, Adrian's implementation makes it a snap to port this code to Qt4, and several changes improve the correctness of Krita's rendering a lot.

There have been other improvements to Krita, too, recently. I've cleaned up the plugin system and made sure only plugins with the right version number are loaded, we have a docker tab with a dynamically updated histogram and new and very cool wavelets filter: